Businesses are increasingly forced to deal with the ethics of human rights on a global front, and the question of how to do it is complex, according to the leader of a worldwide foundation who spoke Tuesday at Kansas University.

“This is a subject that has developed tremendously over the last six years,” said Klaus M. Leisinger, president and chief executive officer of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development. “What is a fair-minded, reasonable, human rights obligation capital that you will expect from a company?”

Leisinger spoke to a crowd that nearly filled Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union as he delivered this year’s Walter S. Sutton Ethics Lecture for the KU School of Business and the International Center for Ethics in Business. Leisinger’s speech was titled “Human Rights and Business: Corporate Ethics Challenges and the Pharmaceutical Industry.”

Leisinger noted that two of the items in a United Nations global compact addressed business human rights issues, calling for businesses to support and protect international human rights and to not become compliant in human rights abuses.

Prior to his speech Leisinger addressed the ebola outbreak in Africa and made references to the battles against other diseases in impoverished Third World areas. Companies that do the research and development of drugs for those diseases find there is no market in those areas to recoup their costs.

“You have a market-failure situation and you are expected to invest some money and this is definitely not going to happen,” Leisinger said.

Yet diseases that are controllable cause the deaths of 30,000 children a day, Leisinger said. Those diseases stem from poor health habits in poverty-stricken areas, he said. There are 2.8 billion people in the world who live on less than $2 a day and 40 million people suffering from HIV and AIDS. The public and the private sectors can combine to deal with those problems if there is also a political will, he said.

“To prevent disease is much more effective and much less expensive,” Leisinger said.

6News video: Business leader delivers ethics lecture

The Novartis Foundation acts as a link between society and companies, and as a facilitator that brings developmental policy issues and external views to the attention of the company.